> It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the future we realise mass shields us from a gravitational field that pushes everything in all directions at once as opposed to our current thinking that mass emits a field that pulls us towards it.
It would definitely surprise me since I know that this theory — since it's such an obvious hypothesis — has been proposed multiple times since Newton's own (it's now colloquially called "Le Sage's theory of gravitation" [0], but it had many other proponents including Kelvin, H. Lorentz and Thomson) and it has always failed to accomodate the equivalence of graviational and inertional masses: after all, the gravity is not proportional to the cross-section of the bodies, and graviational shielding does not exist — experiments done by Eötvös were quite decisive in that regard.
It would definitely surprise me since I know that this theory — since it's such an obvious hypothesis — has been proposed multiple times since Newton's own (it's now colloquially called "Le Sage's theory of gravitation" [0], but it had many other proponents including Kelvin, H. Lorentz and Thomson) and it has always failed to accomodate the equivalence of graviational and inertional masses: after all, the gravity is not proportional to the cross-section of the bodies, and graviational shielding does not exist — experiments done by Eötvös were quite decisive in that regard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage%27s_theory_of_gravitat...